The March article is out! Coffees of Colombia 2012

Both the dark side and the bright side of the trend toward offering select, precisely identified lots of green coffee (aka “microlots”) showed up in this month’s sampling of thirty-four coffees from Colombia. On the bright side, we cupped several precisely identified, small-lot coffees that expressed pure and subtle variations on the classic Colombia high-grown profile. On the dark side, we had other samples displaying fine-sounding, microlot-ish names on their packaging but ranging in the cup from ordinary to flat-out tainted. We expected more of the kind of coffees that Colombia’s reputation was built on: Your basic, dependable high-grown Latin American coffee, a little simple aromatically perhaps, but strong-structured, acidy, big-bodied, balanced, clean. Unfortunately, if I were to describe a typical Colombia profile based only on the coffees we cupped this month, I wo...